In Country | Historical Context

In Country Historical Context

The Vietnam War

As is usually the case when seeking the cause of any war, the roots of the Vietnam War can be traced backwards in time for decades or even centuries, to ancient injustices and insults that have boiled over into modern times. One place to start explaining the war could be the remote year of 208 BC, the year that the Han dynasty of China expanded southward declaring the region that contains modern Vietnam to be a new Chinese province. This began a cycle of Chinese invasion and local resistance that has flared up sporadically ever since.

Another source of the conflict came in 1863, when the French, in the process of colonizing the region that they called Indochina, established a protectorate over Cambodia and began the process of annexing Cochin-china (southern Vietnam), then Annam (central Vietnam), then Tonkin (northern Vietnam). French imperialism throughout the first decades of the twentieth...
(read more)